Who says power and water don’t mix?
As a civil engineer and geologist with master’s degrees and professional certifications in both, I have provided consulting services on four continents across nearly thirty years. With a professional focus on water engineering, Osa Water Works was founded informally in 1995 and incorporated in 2000. In addition to basic water supply, purification, sanitation, and such, the company aggressively pursued hydroelectric jobs and have installed ten micro-hydroelectric systems in the interim.
However, as we were tasked during the decade of the oughts with providing increasing infrastructure services in Costa Rica, we diversified to solar power engineering, installation, and maintena nce in 2001 to address the needs of clients that did not have hydroelectric resources. Since then considerable changes in Costa Rican law have come into effect that provide strong financial incentives for solar and hydroelectric expansion. With the dramatic decline in solar panel costs, small-scale hydroelectric rarely competes economically with solar at the residential scale, yet is still competitive at the cogeneration scale. Accordingly, I partnered with Daryl Bonin and Ron Klein to found River Run Hydro two years to focus on run of river development of commercial hydroelectric resources.
The upshot is that we have a considerable amount of expertise in infrastructure: roads and drainage, power supply, water supply, and waste management and have a particular talent with remote and/or complex installations. Commonly, our work involves two or more of these fields in a single site and we commonly are tasked with initial facility planning and engineering and provide a systems approach to cost-effective property engineering, design, and permitting challenges.
But it still is conceptually a bit odd to tire-kickers to come across a company like mine that claims expertise in fields whose commonality has practically no technical cross-links. So, this web site focuses on our electrical contracting and solar engineering capacity.
For water supply and treatment, sanitation, and road and drainage engineering please learn more at Osa Water Works.
For hydroelectric information, learn more at River Run Hydro.
Paul Collar
Osa Power & Water
May 1, 2014